Abstract

This dissertation is guided by my sense that most of the poems in Delmore Schwartz's canon, in one way or another, openly or implicitly, measure the accessibility or attainability of both the lived and essential knowledge demanded by phenomenology. I will consider Schwartz's themes---the uses of the past, urban estrangement, modernist exile, Old Testament moralism, the wages of Capitalism, existential freedom---in the context of the "philosophic mind" in which they were conceived. I apply rhetorical and textual analysis when attending to the formal aspects of his verse; a study of ideational significance calls for a closer look at the environing philosophical context. I defend the notion that Schwartz combines modernist practice and, in his terms, "revery over the essences" in a manner peculiarly his own. I undertake to demonstrate here that we are enjoined by Schwartz's poetry itself to reflect on the epistemological commitment of his images, themes and tropes. "Having snow" is his most enduring metaphor: although snow can be perceived and apperceived, it can never be "had."